Podcast talking about why music from the 80's was so bad...
They do get into bands that were good from the 80's, and an hour is not enough time to cover them all, but still, a funny discussion with plenty to entertain and annoy.
Especially for those of us whose musical taste evolved during that era...
9 comments:
I listened to a majority of the podcast yesterday. A few toughts:
1. Middle-aged white quasi-rock critics think '80s pop music was an abomonation. Not exactly revelatory, nor is it a shock that their selection of "good bands" are either the famed R.E.M. or the Replacements, or random smattering of undergound or Brit-pop/rock.
2. What the hell is so wrong about "Let's Hear It For the Boy" (a song made for female pre-teens, not pasty adult critics) or "You Make My Dreams Come True", a song that defines catchy?
3. The discussion here is the snark-inducing Top 40 area of the 1980s. I agree that much of it was forgettable. I don't completely agree we were saved by grunge. When T-Clog included "Take On Me" in a recent CMC mix, I remarked that the genre has some great songs.
I have a warm place in my heart for the pop music of the 80's. It was pretty much all I listened to. I didn't find out about The Replacements until I went to college and 'the great awakening' began.
Objectively, however, the principal point of the podcast was that it was WILDLY over produced, which is hard to deny. Let's Hear it For The Boy was popular because it was catchy and from a very popular movie. It could have been produced vastly differently and it might have had more staying power.
I think most critics are jackasses operating under the illusion that they are uniquely capable of assessing the objective merits of whatever art form they happen to be an expert in. It's crap. They have a greater breadth of knowledge, which gives them more credibility, but they all come at the world with a very personal history.
'Butt rock' as a description of the Warrant, Great White, etc genre I thought was apropos.
And yes, Take on Me, and many other songs of that era, are worthy.
Devil's advocate: "Over-produced" they may be, but is that not the time-stamp? We allow it for other genres, other periods of time.. anyone hear the "wall of sound" this decade?
Okay, gut check. I admit: I support overproduction only for songs I like. Listen to anything the Rolling Stones did during the '80s, and note the ghastly overproduction. Listen to "Undercover" if you dare. The title track, "She Was Hot", or "Too Much Blood" were overdubbed, overreverbed.. hell, Charile Watts problably didn't even show up, the drum sound was so phony. It's too bad, becuase those songs should be part of the Stones canon.
Over-production is clearly in the eye of the beholder. Lots of the stuff The Beatles were doing from the middle of their careers on was 'produced' to an insane degree.
Beck spends as much as 16 hours on certain seconds of his songs...
Radiohead went from being a more or less straight up rock band into something more like tone poems you can dance too and sing along with.
Things that sound dated are bad. Lots of the orchestration of perfectly wonderful songs by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole was AWFUL, or at least sounds that way now.
So, basically I think the notion that the 80's was possibly the worst decade for music from the 1950's on is fairly easy to argue. But every decade has been filled with god awful pop music.
See Billboard's latest top 10 of all time.
Yuck
I assume Billboard ranks based on units moved/played in the genre. They change their ranking methods, making it truly difficult to gauge current songs against the '50s. I think I've heard that Mariah Carey song a couple of times my entire life. Speaking of the '80s, that song sounds like it was lifted right out of that decade and planted into 2005. Ditto the Santana song. Who would have thought Rob Thomas would come right before The Twist?
I'm not sure Dated = Bad in every instance.
No, but timeless is clearly the gold-standard.
I agree, however "timeless" can't be determined for years. For example, "Whiter Shade of Pale" sounds timeless now, but was the goal or was that sound selected for its timelessness?
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